Eugenios the Aetolian
Our Venerable Father Eugenios the Aetolian, Teacher of the Nation
Venerable · Priest · b. 1595, at Mega Dendron in Apokouro, Aetolia — d. August 5, 1682, at the monastery of Agia Paraskevi, Vrangiana
Commemorated 5 August — His repose at the school-monastery of Agia Paraskevi in the Agrapha
Eugenios was a monk, priest and above all a teacher, who spent the middle of the seventeenth century founding schools in the poorest and most inaccessible mountains of Greece. Born in Aetolia in 1595 and trained under the best masters the Greek world then had — Theophilos Korydalleus and Meletios Syrigos — he refused the careers those studies opened and went back into the Agrapha, the "unwritten" highlands of the Pindus that the Ottoman registers had never properly reached, to teach Greek letters and the faith to mountain children. He founded the school at Karpenisi and, in 1661, the Hellenomouseion at the monastery of Agia Paraskevi at Vrangiana, which became the most famous school of the Greek interior. He died there on 5 August 1682 and was buried in the tomb he had prepared for himself in the narthex. The Ecumenical Patriarchate numbered him among the saints on 1 July 1982.
Aetolia and the schools
He was born in 1595 in the village of Mega Dendron in the district of Apokouro in Aetolia, and was named Ioannoules — Giannoulis — the name by which his family and his later correspondents knew him; Eugenios is his monastic name.
He was tonsured and, in 1616, ordained deacon at the monastery of Tatarna on the Acheloos. From there he went out to be educated, and the itinerary of his schooling is itself a map of what was left of Greek learning under the Ottomans: he studied under Theophilos Korydalleus — the Aristotelian who reformed Greek higher teaching in that century — at Trikala, and afterwards in Cephalonia and Zakynthos, the Venetian islands where the schools were free; he spent time at the monastery of Xeropotamou on Mount Athos; he was ordained priest in 1619 at the monastery of St Catherine on Sinai; and he completed his studies at Constantinople, under Korydalleus again and under Meletios Syrigos, the great anti-Latin theologian of the age.
The Agrapha
With that formation he could have taught anywhere in the Greek world, or held office in the Patriarchate. He went instead into the Agrapha — the range of the southern Pindus whose name means "the unwritten," because its villages were not entered in the Ottoman tax rolls and it kept a stubborn practical autonomy. It was the poorest and remotest Greek country there was, and Eugenios spent the rest of his long life teaching in it.
He established at Karpenisi a school of higher letters — his contemporaries called it an academy — with a church of the Holy Trinity beside it, and taught there for years. In 1661, moving deeper into the mountains, he founded a school at the monastery of Agia Paraskevi at Vrangiana in Eurytania, which came to be known as the Hellenomouseion of the Agrapha. It taught grammar, the Greek Fathers, philosophy on Korydalleus's lines, and the elements of the sciences; its pupils came from all over central Greece and it supplied teachers and clergy to the region for generations. His foremost disciple, Anastasios Gordios, continued the work and wrote his life.
What Eugenios was doing has a name in Greek history: he stands at the head of the line of teacher-monks who kept literacy and the Greek language alive in the countryside during the darkest stretch of the Ottoman centuries, the line that runs on to Cosmas of Aetolia — his own countryman, born forty years after his death — who took the same work out of the schoolroom and onto the roads. Eugenios's method was the school; his correspondence, a substantial body of letters that survives, shows him begging books, placing pupils, and arguing about money with village elders.
Repose
He died at Vrangiana on 5 August 1682, in his eighty-seventh year, and was buried in the narthex of the church of Agia Paraskevi, in a tomb he had prepared with his own hands. His grave became a place of local pilgrimage almost at once, and the veneration of "the Teacher" persisted in the Agrapha villages without interruption.
The Ecumenical Patriarchate formally inscribed him in the calendar of saints on 1 July 1982, three centuries after his death, and appointed his commemoration for the day of his repose.
Feast and commemoration
August 5 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 18), the forefeast of the Transfiguration and within the Dormition fast. The commemoration is Greek — kept by the Ecumenical Patriarchate and with particular solemnity in Eurytania and Aetolia, at Karpenisi and at the monastery of Agia Paraskevi at Vrangiana where his relics lie; it is not carried by the Slavonic books or by the Orthodox Church in America's calendar for the day.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O father, was the divine image preserved with exactness; for taking up thy cross, thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, which passeth away, and to care for the soul, which is immortal. Wherefore doth thy spirit rejoice with the angels, O venerable Eugenios.
Iconography
Eugenios is painted as a priest-monk and teacher: in the black mantiya and klobuk or in the schema, with a long white beard, and — the attribute that identifies him — an open book or scroll held out to the viewer, sometimes inscribed with the opening of a grammar or a line of the Psalms, and occasionally with children or young pupils at his feet. Some modern icons set the mountain school of Vrangiana behind him. He belongs iconographically with the teacher-saints of the Turkish period.
All images of him are modern: he was glorified in 1982, and no pre-1900 depiction is known or claimed. He is therefore recorded among the wanted icons of this reference, with the note that no storable image is likely ever to be found.
Disputed questions
- His name. The sources give the family name variously as Giannoulis, Giannoules or Ioannoules; his baptismal name is generally given as Ioannis/Giannoulis and his monastic name as Eugenios. He signs himself "Eugenios the Aetolian."
- The dates of his schooling. The sequence Tatarna–Trikala–Ionian Islands–Athos–Sinai– Constantinople is drawn from the Life by Anastasios Gordios and from his letters; the individual years, apart from the diaconate of 1616 and the priesthood of 1619, are not all fixed.
- His recognition. He was venerated locally from his death, but his formal glorification is modern (1982). Entries of this kind sit awkwardly in a fixed calendar and are noted here for what they are: an old local cultus given universal Greek recognition in the twentieth century.